California Gold (16 page)

“Nellie!” He reined Conquistador and trotted straight over. “You’d better beware. Around here, they shoot people from San Francisco papers.”

She laughed. “I’m sure of it. I’ll take care to stay out of their way. My, you’re so brown. The work must agree with you.”

“It does.” He was thrilled to see her and could hardly keep his thoughts or emotions in order.

“Do you think you could get some time off?” she went on. “A week? Ten days, even? Mr. Hearst gave me a vacation. I’d like to show you some of the real California.”

“Well, I can try. The foreman likes me. He wouldn’t pay for the time—”

“Is that a problem?”

“No, no. I’ve been putting money in Wells, Fargo regularly. I’ll ask.”

“We’d leave Monday. You should bring some warm clothing. I’ll arrange for the tent and supplies in Stockton.”

“Stockton? Where’re we going?”

“Into the Sierras.”

His mouth grew dry at the thought of traveling with her. Half facetiously, he said, “Will you supply us a chaperon too?”

“Don’t get any ideas, Mr. Chance. A woman in my profession doesn’t have much of a reputation to guard, but there will be no threat to what’s left. Our trip is for sightseeing only.”

Their eyes met and then they looked away almost simultaneously. Had he seen disappointment in her face too? He couldn’t be sure.

T
HE SAN JOAQUIN SHIMMERED
, bright as a sheet of sunlit metal. Mack and Nellie leaned on the steamer’s bow rail, the shoulders of their coarse flannel shirts touching.

“I’m Russian,” she said. If there’d been no rail, he’d have fallen into the broad, slow river. “My real name is Natalia Rotchev.”

Hands clasped, brown eyes on the horizon, she told him about herself. She was a native Californian, and a distant relative of the last leader of the Russian colony. Mack had never heard of Russians in California.

“They had a substantial fort and settlement on the coast north of the City. The experiment failed and they withdrew in 1842, but my father’s father stayed. He changed his name to Ross as homage to his ancestry and the settlement, Fort Ross. It was named that after the mother country,
Rossiya.
”

Her father, a competent farmer, had drifted down to the Valley, where she was born. “It was an ideal life in many ways, but Papa was far from an ideal parent. He was extremely old-fashioned. He treated my mother almost like a servant.” Nellie swept blowing hair from her eyes and looked at Mack. “Very early, I saw what a terrible life she led. I decided I’d never be trapped that way—dominated by a man.”

Near a settlement that became Hanford, Tulare County—“The town was named for a treasurer of the Central Pacific, Mr. Hanford; that’s irony for you”—the Ross family settled on land owned by the railroad. “The railroad invited settlement. Their agents promised that eventually farmers like my father could buy his land for two dollars and fifty cents an acre. Years of work, and a lot of improvements like irrigation ditches helped turn what people once called Starvation Valley into profitable farmland. When the railroad realized how the farmers had improved things, they reneged on their promise. They put our land up for sale at seventeen to forty dollars an acre. On the open market.”

Hurtful memory hushed her voice. He could barely hear her above the splash of the bow wake.

“Papa couldn’t afford that. He had everything tied up in stock, seed, equipment. And he felt cheated. He and other farmers organized a protest group called the Settlers League. One day—it was eight years ago, May 1880—the railroad sent men to claim the land. Armed men, with a marshal. The farmers took out their guns and met them. They say the farmers fired first, but I don’t believe it. If they did start it, they were provoked. Seven men died, including Papa. They called it the Battle of Mussel Slough. May of 18 and 80…I was fourteen years old. I saw them carry Papa into our parlor draped in a bloody blanket…”

Now her hands were like twisted wires, and drained of blood. “That was bad enough. What came afterward was worse. Railroad men seized the Hanford telegraph office so the story couldn’t get out to the newspapers. In the City, Huntington and Charley Crocker went to every editor with their own slanted story, putting all the blame on the farmers. Crocker and Huntington strangled the truth and perverted the idea of freedom of the press. I was just old enough to understand that—and from that moment, there was never any doubt about what I wanted to do with my life. Write. Tell the truth. Destroy the railroad.”

Her mother, two brothers, and three sisters had been evicted, as had the families of the other settlers. She left home, changed her first name to Nellie, and plunged into the street life of San Francisco. Telling this, she grew a little more animated.

“I was too young and eager to worry about possible dangers. I had more jobs than I could count. I lived next door to Madam Cora Swett’s bordello. The madam fed me and became my friend. I met Emperor Norton the First, a kind of crazy king of the streets. I played with his dogs, Bummer and Lazarus—they were pets of the whole city, practically. I listened to Norton describe his big idea for a bridge to Oakland. Other people jeered, but I thought it perfectly sensible. Finally I had enough money to enroll at the University of California at Berkeley—women were admitted there starting in 1870; it’s a very progressive institution. While I was there, I also learned typewriting at night. After I graduated I applied to Mr. Hearst. I showed him sample articles and got a job—probably because I’m a woman. Mr. Hearst is an amorous man. I managed to avoid his embraces while convincing him that I’d do anything, go anywhere, take any risk to be the very best sob sister in town.”

The steamer’s mate came by. “Stockton in a half hour.”

“Now you know everything there is,” she finished with a little shrug.

“I understand why you’re independent.”

“And why I hate the railroad?”

“Yes,” he said, “that too.”

In Stockton they hired a wagon and filled it with a tent, bedrolls, knapsacks, and provisions. Nellie explained what she called ‘division of labor’: She rented or bought their supplies and he in return would provide most of the hard physical work. “There’ll be plenty, so no argument.”

He laughed. You didn’t argue with Nellie unless you were ready for war.

They set out southeast, on the Old Sonora Road to the mines of the Mother Lode. “And thence to the Big Oak Flat and Yosemite Toll Road,” she said.

“You have to pay to get there?”

“Surely you don’t disapprove, Mr. Chance. The local folk are just getting rich like other Californians.”

“Ow,” he said. They both smiled.

They drove past grape arbors, melon patches, pastures, through wheat fields and tiny towns drowsing in the heat. They crossed the Stanislaus at Knights Ferry and climbed into rolling foothills speckled with red cattle and white egrets. Poppies painted whole hilltops the color of gold. The Sierras grew taller ahead, lower slopes dark green with pines and redwoods, high summits snow-whitened still. He had evil memories of crossing those mountains, but now that was softened by the spectacular beauty—or was it the girl riding beside him on the hard seat, taking her turn and handling the team as competently as any man?

That evening, he volunteered to help with the meal, peeling and dicing some potatoes they’d brought along, then seasoning them in the skillet with onion and a bit of golden bell pepper. Nellie complimented him on his cooking.

“Pa taught me. If you don’t have a lot of food, he said, cooking gives you more time to enjoy what there is.”

She laughed.

He thought of something he’d wanted to know for some time, and asked, “That man Hellman, the landowner—how did he get his nickname?”

“That’s a strange question.”

“No, earlier today I was remembering him from the night Greenway fired me.”

Satisfied, she explained that in 1850 the federal government had passed a reclamation act returning millions of acres of worthless land to the western states. “Swampland, marshland—it was that kind of land in other states, but they made a mistake in California. Here the land just looked worthless after a heavy rain. Actually it was some of the richest land anyone could want. But the state went ahead and sold it for something like a dollar and ten cents an acre.”

Hellman had been a young immigrant in those days, she said, an apprentice in a Sacramento butcher shop. “I’ve no idea how he got the capital for his first investment, but he was soon battling Henry Miller for this or that piece of land, and both of them were bribing surveyors and assessors to certify that a given parcel was swampland when it wasn’t. Miller and Hellman got rich from the swamp scheme, but Hellman got the nickname.”

“Interesting.” Mack set his tin plate aside and saw her watching him intently.

“Now it’s time for you to talk.”

“Yes?”

“Why did you really come to California?”

The cheerful campfire and the camaraderie of a good meal shared with the darkness falling combined to overcome his reticence. Besides, if there was ever a girl to be trusted, Nellie was the one.

“Well, first of all, I came here because in Pennsylvania I never slept in a clean bed or wore a clean shirt. The air was so dirty around the coal mines, snow turned black an hour after it fell. It was a terrible life. I don’t want to tell you anything that’ll make you sick—”

She shook her head and gestured him on impatiently.

“I saw my pa’s friends from the mines come to supper and cough up blood right on the table. I saw eight- and nine-year-old boys bent like old men from sorting coal twelve, fourteen hours a day. I was bent that way myself for a long time. I watched them go down into the mines about age twelve with nothing to hope for except getting out alive at the end of a day spent driving a mule cart in the dark. I saw special police hired by the mine owners break men’s legs with billy clubs because the men wanted to organize for shorter hours or safer work. Jerry Caslin, he was a Molly Maguire—”

“The secret society. I’ve read of it.”

“The special police clubbed Jerry so hard, he couldn’t recognize his wife or kids afterward. All he could do was sit in a chair by the window and drool and piss—excuse me, that slipped out. He couldn’t help soiling himself all the time, poor Jerry. Someone finally fed him a tin of rat poison so he could die. Nobody asked who did it, not even the priest. So there are a lot of reasons I came to California, but the biggest reason was my pa. He came out in the Gold Rush, and he failed, and went back, and he was poor all his life. But he still believed in this place. Pa said that if a man couldn’t find any hope where he was, he could always find it in California. He believed it in spite of his own sad life, and because of him, I believe it. I always will.”

Moved, Nellie couldn’t speak. She reached across the fire to touch his hand a moment. Shyly, he looked away. What a remarkable young man, she thought. Just remarkable.

Next day he observed that she seemed quite familiar with the roads to the high country. She said she’d traveled them often as a little girl. “I went with Uncle Sebastian, who married my mother’s sister, Aunt Anya. Sebastian was a Basque sheepherder. Every summer he took his flock to the high pastures, and the whole family went along. Aunt Anya was a rugged woman; she worked as hard as he did, and so did their son, Tomás. I worked too, but it always seemed like a vacation. To this day, Tomás is my favorite among all my cousins.”

At day’s end they passed through Chinese Camp, once overflowing with miners, now sparsely populated. A fading sign advertising sturdy work pants by Levi Strauss produced an eerie feeling in Mack. Maybe his pa had trod this same rough road. He often said he’d been all over the Mother Lode country in his search for a rich claim.

They were climbing; Mack could feel it in the sharp thin air. But they must go higher still, she said, to find the secret valley to which her uncle had taken her as a child.

“The Valley of the Yosemite. It’s an old Indian name. The original tribe, the Ahwahneechee, named it Ahwahnee: ‘Deep Grassy Valley.’ White men found it in 18 and 51. The men of the Mariposa Battalion. The militia was out hunting some of Chief Tenaya’s Indians, who, they said, were harassing the gold miners. You won’t believe the place, Mack. Its beauty will make you weep.”

On narrow Jacksonville Hill, Nellie parked in a turnout among the digger pines and explained that many a gold coach had been waylaid up here in the old days. Along the south fork of the Tuolumne, she taught him how to pronounce that strange beautiful word. She detoured down a smaller road to show him the most remarkable trees he’d ever seen. They were cinnamon-colored with incredible height and girth.

“Sequoia. Older than man’s memory. They may be the oldest things on earth.” It was hushed beneath them, the kind of hush appropriate to a dim church.

Before they left Tuolumne Grove they drove to the Dead Giant, a great tourist attraction, according to Nellie. The topmost section of the sequoia was gone, but some two hundred feet of trunk remained, the upper part jaggedly divided into two towering spires, like horns. The road pierced the center of the mighty trunk.

“Tunneled in 18 and 78,” she said. “Drive right through.”

The wagon just fit. He laughed aloud.

“You mentioned tourists. I don’t see any.”

“It’s early. Summer’s the time. Last year twenty-five hundred people came up to Yosemite. One day we’re going to be fighting hard to save these places. I have a friend, a Scotsman, a kind of wild, wonderful mountain man I met up here when I was a girl, and he’s already fighting.”

Shortly he saw why. A caravan of six flatbed wagons, each with eight huge tree trunks chained down, rumbled down past the turnout where they’d stopped.

“Bastards,” Nellie said. “They’ll strip the high country if we don’t stop them.”

He came out of the white dream thrashing his arms and crying, “Pa? Where are you?”

Someone tugged him. “Mack. Wake up …”

His eyes flew open. He felt cold night air on his cheeks, smelled the wild grass and pines, saw the high darkness full of blazing stars…then Nellie, in her long gray flannel nightgown and barefoot, standing between him and the campfire, which had been reduced to embers that sparked and billowed in the breeze.